These images show a ray casting engine I wrote last weekend (April
18-20). It was a fun and short project to simulate a laser striking
some scene elements (right now only spheres). The engine uses SDL for
input, timing, and graphics initialization, and OpenGL for the 3D
acceleration. The first image shows a simulated laser emitter striking
a large sphere, which in turn bounces a few rays off a second sphere.
And the next, the large sphere is used as the emitter, which bounces
rays off the second sphere. Camera controls behave very much like my
controls for Quake in fly mode. These images show around 5000 rays
each, and render at a friendly 20-30fps on my GeForce3. No
optimizations have been bothered with as of yet, so scene complexity is
still an evil O(n^2) issue. Not that it matters with only two scene
elements.